THE POETRY OF THE BALLADS 3!

have a kind of counterpoint of their own. The story moves
forward in bounds, against a background of regular stanzaic
melody and against the formal patterning of folk art: the
repetitions in threes and sevens and the conventional phrases.
The rapidity and violence of the action is all the more striking
because of the decorum and formality maintained in the
ballads. Gummere has well described their movement as
"leaping and lingering". *,' , ^

The main end of the ballads is to present the story drama-
tically, and therefore explanation, moralist comment, and even
original phraseology are suppressed. Unconventional metaphors
are rare, perhaps because they might hold up the narrative.
There are not many things in the ballads like this beautiful
stanza from 'The Gay Goshawk" (96 E 6):

is, in my love's cheek
dd'spilt-amang the* sftaw
The white that is on her breast-bone
Is like the down on the white sea-maw.*

or this from "Willie and Lady Maisry" (70 A, 8):

With her feet as white as sleet

She strode her bower within,
And with her fingers long and small

She's looten Sweet Willie in.

The ballads use their own peculiar rhetoric and poetic diction
to increase the dramatic pressure. Phrases like "He hadna
gone a mile, a mile . . ." or "He bent his bow and swam"
or "The up and spoke the little foot-page", and conventional
epithets like "the gold so red" or "the wan water" are constantly
found. The ballads are sternly economical in their vocabulary.
They use the Homeric epithet for much the same reason as
' Homer is said to have used it: to avoid distraction from the
story-telling.2 The listeners can rest on the familiar and
repeated epithets and so concentrate the better on the
working-out of the plot.

*Mew